Technology Integration

This is Google Earth is free, works on both Macs and PCs, and takes only a couple of minutes to download from the Google Earth Web site. With a magnification tool powerful enough to complete one continuous zoom from an altitude of 38,000 miles to as low as 25 feet, and an ever-expanding network of related resources, it’s a practically limitless teaching tool!!

On the most superficial level, Google Earth can teach students about geography, distance (MATH), and topography. Starting from the basic Google Earth interface, students can type in any location on the computer.  They can save their favorite places by using a “placemark.”  Students usually start small…they type in their address or school.  They notice the rivers, roads, houses, and other things in the surrounding area.  You can listen to students share there traveling experiences with one another, where they would like to go, and things they would like to discover.

That is the beauty of it. Looking at the world with this much scope and detail, it’s hard not to notice, for instance, that cities are often nestled in the bends of rivers, between mountains, near airports etc.

“It has kids make realizations based on observations they make,” says Aidan Chopra, an education program manager at Google, “and that’s really the gold standard in education. There are no conclusions in Google Earth; there are trillions of pieces of information out there that students can use to form their own conclusions. A good teacher can then build on those observations and guide them to meet the class’s learning objectives.”

Almost any academic subject has a connection to geography, Chopra adds. “If I were teaching literature,” he says, “I wouldn’t just have the students write essays about what they’d read; I would have them create placemarks, maybe make an audiovisual tour of where the events took place, to give them some concreteness. Let’s map out Paul Revere’s ride. Where did these Civil War battles take place? What distinguished Northern geography from the South?”

For students who don’t respond well to verbal information, Google Earth creates a new kind of classwork and problem-solving method. “Say you’re doing a section on distance and you’re learning miles per hour and systems of measurement,” says Chopra. “You can give a kid a word problem and say, ‘A train went 6 miles in three hours; how fast was it going?’ Other kids might want to make a diagram. So I might say, ‘Go to Paris, and measure the Champs Elysées. Now, find out how long it took Lance Armstrong to do the Tour de France, and then tell me, how long would it take him to get down the Champs Elysées?’”

And when those few precious educational dollars are spent, Doering adds, it’s critical to keep looking forward. “Where should we invest our money?” he asks. “Should we invest it in textbooks, so that students will have access to outdated information a year from now? We need to invest in what is going to provide students with the tools that they will need in the future. And we need to invest in pedagogy to enable teachers to use them.”

Google Earth
Here’s where you can download Google Earth and find out more about its capabilities.